Climber – One day while browsing the LEGO Mindstorms site, I noticed some pictures about a show in Germany. LEGO had built 2 cool wall climbing robots to help market the product. I was amazed at the design and capabilities that they had and wanted to find out just how hard it would be to build something like this and have it actually work. It was quite a challenge. Building the components was the...

DominoBot 2 was my take on re-creating my original DominoBot. After I had finished the original, I found ways to make it more efficient and better at what the original did. I also did not have the limitations of the parts supplied with the RIS and UBS sets. One of the parts that needed re-designing was the mechanism used to force domino’s out of the chamber. The original tended to have difficulties at times....

Wall Follower was one of those “proof-of-concepts” robots. The intent was to build something small and compact that was fast and versatile. Wall Follower can navigate around a room, on a table, in a maze, whatever. It is built from one of the basic robot platforms in the Mindstorms Contructopedia. Motion is done by 2 motors, each of which can steer by removing power to one. The main sensor is the DIRPD sensor (grey)...

Spaz is my take on the famous LegWay robot first built by Steve Hassenplug. The version here is not quite the same as Steve’s, but more like the one built by Philo called “Yet Another LegWay”. The difference being, I did not have the special distance sensors that LegWay uses. Instead, Philo built a version that uses the regular Lego light sensors.

Rope Climber has been built for the rtlToronto Lego Robotics Event – Rope Climbing. In a nutshell – build a robot that can find and climb a rope. Sounds easy right? Not! In the tradition of rtlToronto, there are some interesting rules to make this more challenging. First off – the robot must fit within a 8x8x8 square on start. The trick – the rope is hanging 12 inches off the ground. The robot...

PicoCam was built as a proof of concept. Its purpose was simple, navigate an area using typical avoidance routines while capturing live wireless video/audio and transmitting it to a receiver. The was never really completed because I had other ideas brewing… The pictures shown here are of the final version, with working navigation, but I did not bother going the last step to get the live video to display (even though it will work).

You would think I have a template for “room-navigating” robots… TrackerBot evolved from the recent PicoCam robot I created. After I had finished PicoCam, I decided I wanted to try something with tracks. TrackerBot and PicoCam share similar intelligence, with TrackerBot having some slight improvements. The general idea is that it will navigate a room using a variety of sensory input for obstacle avoidance. There are 3 Cybermaster touch sensors, 1 DIRP light sensor...

Big Wheel (BW) was an experiment at building a robot that uses the HailFire Driod (StarWars) large wheels. It’s job is simple; build an autonomous robot that can navigate any area while avoiding obstacles by not hitting them in the first place. To do this, BW uses a DIRPD sensor to “see” left, right and center. This allows BW avoide obstacles from 3 views before actually hitting them.

One of my early projects was to build a fire extinguishing robot. I did this using the parts I had at the time. It was based on a walker platform and used a pneumatic circut to “blow” the fire out when detected. It worked reasonably well with the provided light sensor. Recently, I discovered the PIR (Passive Infrared Sensor) from TechnoStuff. This sensor was built to detect infrared heat and seemed to be a...

I managed to re-work an old design. By using 2 motors and drive mechanisms, I was able to get the walker to steer. The key to steering is the syncro mechanism that I setup. It uses 2 touch sensors – 1 on each of the left and right center drive legs. Using NQC, the code will monitor the timing of the rotations. It goes something like this: When sensor #1 is triggered – is...